


A Day in the Leaf

by Jay Tryfanstone (tryfanstone)



Category: The Wood Wife - Terri Windling
Genre: Bookstores, Gen, Post-Canon, Yuletide 2018, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 01:53:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17132822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tryfanstone/pseuds/Jay%20Tryfanstone
Summary: @bookartsgalleryToday only, we're pleased to invite you to the launch of Free Spirit, the biography of poet Davis Cooper, with local author Maggie Black and friends. Doors open 7. Free entry, refreshments, dancing. #tucson #poetry #livemusic #bookstore





	A Day in the Leaf

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cher](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cher/gifts).



She'd left the spotlights on but turned off the overheads, and the tall standard lamp with its bell-flower head stood by the table, so that Maggie's new books were stacked in a pool of light. There was a pleasing structural symmetry to the tall hardback piles, the shapes and patterns of light and shadow, the sharp edges of the newly cut pages, the rounded curve of each spine and the thin, elegant gleam of the covers. Maggie's ex-husband Nigel had found an editor who had grown up on Cooper's poetry and committed themself to the book, so that the paper and binding were well-done, and the cover with its vitrified sea-glass abstract was a lovely thing. Dora let her hand linger on the gloss of it as she twitched the table-cloth into place and laid down a couple of pens for signing, although Maggie would almost certainly bring her own. The publisher had sent an upstand, with artwork of the cover, and of Maggie's familiar face looking elegantly sophisticated against a background of stonework, the silver streak in her hair highlighted and her eyes knowing. She was wearing a black jacket, but a snatch of red flannel showed under the shirt, so that this sophisticated Maggie, the Maggie of studio photographs and publisher's lunches and literary salons, carried a little of the desert with her.

The streets outside were shading into evening, traffic dying down with the sun. Dora had closed the gallery door to the last of the tourists half an hour ago, wishing them well with their new picture, hoping that the desert art would find a home in a house where the sunlight glittered from the sea. "Send us a photograph," she'd suggested, smiling. "Our e-mail address is on the back. Enjoy the painting!" When they'd gone, when she could relax into the shape of her own body and the gallery around it, there was a moment when she longed for her own house, for the sand, for her own woven rugs under her bare feet and the cats curling up on her lap. Then she'd hurried to pull the boxes out of the store cupboard and set up the table, so that when Maggie arrived the gallery would look as it should do, the low lights glinting from the display cases with their hand-bound art books, the bookshelves tidy, the paintings on the walls in quiet retreat. All looked as it should, Dora thought critically, although there must be a moth caught by the light, for the standard lamp flickered and its shadows were suddenly feathered. She moved to free it, tilting the shade, but what floated down into her hands was nothing more than a sheet of paper, as fine as tissue, with a roughened hand-made edge. She could already see the book it would make, tall and slim, bound in pale green oilskin.

The paper floated from her hands, and was gone: when she bent down, there was nothing but the shadow of something, as still as any prey animal, disguised as the fold of a table-cloth or the curve of a skirting board. She was, she found, holding her breath. 

The rap on the door was as shocking as the crack of a tree-branch, although she should have expected it. There was a shadowed figure behind the glass, dressed in black, slender and tall. "Maggie!" Dora cried out.

There was quietness about Maggie now that she had not had when she first came to the desert, a depth to her; as if she had set down roots in the red dirt of the Rincon hills. Her eyes were clear and wide, her voice low, a deep rasp of a voice that sounded as if it had been scoured by the wind. "Is everything okay?" she asked. 

"Yes, fine," said Dora. "Maggie, your book's here! Oh, and you brought Johnny too, thank you."

Johnny Foxxe smiled at her from behind Maggie's shoulder, a dark flash of a smile in his tanned face. He'd been growing his hair out, so that the black wings of it dipped over his eyes and gleamed under the street light, and he was wearing the turquoise and silver earrings he and Maggie had brought back from Kazakhstan. He'd always been pretty. With Maggie, he was beautiful. 

He was also one of her oldest friends, and perceptive. "Anything bothering you?" he asked. 

"Oh, just - nothing," Dora said. "Come in. I remembered to put the wine in the fridge. And your friends bought the PA system this afternoon."

"You've changed the room," Maggie said. 

"Well, yes." She'd moved the display cases back against the walls and brought out the folding table for wine. The lights for the paintings were dimmed, for this was a night for words, and the wide wooden floor waited for guests.

"Johnny can help with the chairs," said Maggie. "I thought you'd like something for us. I brought mimosas." She had: she held a cool bag in one hand, smiling, and the glint of mischief in her face as attractive as the curl of laughter-lines at her eyes.

Fox stood in the centre of the room, head tilted, nostrils wide, as if he was smelling his way into the gallery. His dark eyes moved from picture to picture, drifting, until the glass tree in the corner held him still. It was a tall, thin sculpture, made of roughened, translucent glass rods, and in the half-light it looked as if there were leaves draped from its branches. They fell in folds, as if the pages of a book were sliding from their binding. There was a drift of them under the tree, curled by the roots, almost as if a cat lay there.

"Huh," said Fox, blinked, and shook his head. "I brought the pick-up," he said to Dora, "Pepe and my sisters will come along later, there's a show at the museum they wanted to see. I don't know who else came along."

"John and Lillian said they'd be driving in," said Maggie. She set the bag down on the wine table, and extracted a flask, and two improbably colored cocktail glasses. 

"Is the amp through the back?" Fox asked. He was already moving. Fox had the easy, smooth gait of a minor predator. 

"Chairs are in the store room!" Maggie shouted after him, grinning. "There's a lot to be said for a willing young man," she said to Dora.

"I heard that, darlin'," said Fox. 

Maggie's eyes were laughing. They were both independent people, she and Fox, and yet they had built between them something as strong and lasting as the stones of the river bed. Dora said, "I remember when he was all love-struck and moon-shy. How things change!"

"For the better," said Maggie. She'd poured pink mimosas from the flask in her bag, and now, carefully, she was adding a cocktail stick already threaded with crystalised fruit, and an minature parasal with crimson and gold peonies. "I'd say, we should toast ourselves, but where's your book?"

"Mine?" said Dora.

"Yes, yours. Ours. The one we're launching together? Please don't tell me you left them at the studio!"

"Found them in the office," said Fox. "It'll have been busy today with the midwinter tourists." He had the box in his hands, with the new copies. It had looked so small, set beside the crates for Maggie's biography, and the published poetry, too. 

"I never know how to display the art books," Maggie said. "Could you do it? They look so good when you display them."

"There's one in the display case," said Dora. 

"They should be on the table, too," said Maggie, wandering to the cabinet. "I hardly dare touch them, they're so beautiful. Everyone should see them. Oh! You opened it to the Jackalope girl - just look at the detail, the way the shape of the page echoes the words. It's like you saw into my head. And the paper is perfect. I don't know how you managed to press the seeds into it."

"It's just sketches," said Dora. She knew the way that Maggie felt about her work, and her husband Juan, before the art consumed him. "Craft. I meant this evening for you."

"This is for us," said Maggie. "To celebrate all of us." 

She toasted Dora with the frivolous cocktail, which reminded Dora that she had a glass in her hands. She sipped it gently, with pleasure, watching Fox set up the sound system and then start on the chairs. There were a couple of other young men in t-shirts and jeans, who smiled sweetly and worked swiftly, in silence. Maggie had rearranged the books, so that the new biography stood proudly behind little drifts and stands of her own book, the hand-bound, hand-written copies of Maggie's Rincon poems, with the little sketches in the margins, and Maggie's notes. She'd meant the first one just as a gift, but them Maggie had asked if she could do more, and so there must have been twenty or thirty copies on the table. They looked like dancers in the spotlight, pages spread as if they were curtseying, backs proudly upright. 

One of Fox's sisters smiled as she walked past, the liquid glimmer of her dress shimmering with the slight hitch in her stride. Angela. The sister by the glass tree, Isabella, swaying, held out her hand, as if she was introducing herself to a gallery cat.

The gallery had no cat, someone had left the front door open, and there were still wine-glasses to put out. The mimosa must have been stronger than she thought. Dora reached to put down the empty glass and start work, and found Lillian taking it out of her hand. "I see Maggie's here already," she said, smiling. 

Behind her John carried a couple of cases of beer. "You look lovely," he said, his gentle gallantry as always the foil to his raw-boned strength. "Glasses in the kitchen? I'll be right back."

"Honey, it's good to see you," Lillian said, smiling. She'd dressed up, in an Indian print dress with a full skirt that gathered in deep folds around her well-worn cowboy boots, and her hair was up, the steel-silver gray of it bound by a black velvet band. "Congratulations! Maggie says you've sold some of the new books already."

"Well, yes," said Dora. She'd never thought of her books as art, but her hands had begun to take joy in the making of them again, so that half her thoughts were always in the studio Fox had set up for her, in the piles of cream paper and marbled back-boards and velvet bindings. And she had she supposed, sold a few copies from the gallery in the last year, one or two people saying they'd come in specifically for her work. She didn't feel the same consuming urge to create art, though, that Juan had, or Anna and Cooper before him, although she did feel that there was something of her self stitched into each book, as if she could sew not just texture but the way sunlight sunk into velvet covers, or flowed over silk, the feel of solid square pages of thick, hand-woven rag paper as reliable as her own boots, or rice-paper petaled leaves as sheer as the Japanese silk of her scarf. One day, she'd like to make paper from the desert cactus, dry and press it over and over again, like papyrus.

Something moved in the corner of her eye, near the table, set with glasses and bottles and manned by one of Fox's friends with their cello case carefully set against the wall. It was too empheral to be a person, although there were guests here now she recognized from poetry evenings and dance-floors. Something small and mobile, almost translucent, like the flicker of a turning page embossed with ink. For a moment she could see it, a paper fairy as fantastical as any of her Brian Froud prints, and then she blinked and it had gone.

"You see them, then," said Crow. 

He smelled of woodsmoke and sweat, although he was wearing a velvet dinner-jacket over jeans. There were rubies in his ears. 

"You're here," said Dora, thoughtlessly. Crow belonged to the mountains, and the sky. Crow was dangerous. 

"Craft," said Crow. He snorted. "You sew yourself between the pages, and then wonder why they're more than paper."

His eyes were very black, and gleaming, the sharp-glass edge of an obsidian blade. Behind him people were finding seats, taking off their coats, setting down wine-glasses, checking their phones, shaking hands, a film-screen behind Crow's back.

"What do you want?" demanded Dora. "This is Maggie's evening."

Crow looked sideways at her, down the blade of his nose. He was ugly now, and fascinating, where he had been devilishly handsome. "Now there's a question," he said. "What will you give me for an answer, Dora who makes books?"

She could hear the sound of Fox's voice behind her, faded. People laughed. The hush felt expectant. There was, she was very nearly sure, a par of tiny fairies on top of the bookcase, dangling spindly legs, with wings the vivd marbled colors of the endpapers of Maggie's books. They were beautiful, just as she had hoped, but Dora - if she had magic, Dora thought, it must be the domestic sort, self-sufficient and practical. Perhaps there was magic in her craft, as there always would be in Maggie's words. She flexed her toes, comfortable in her steel toe-capped boots.

"We've got free beer," she said to Crow. "And Lillian made wedding cookies."

Crow laughed, a rusty cackle of a laugh. "There's your answer," he said. "I'm here to dance, Dora Bookbinder. Does that answer your question?" He had his head on one side, and his eyes glinted. 

Crow's questions came with barbs and consequences. Dora said, gently, "You're very welcome." Someone ran their fingers over the strings of a guitar, faintly singing, and the smell of tobacco and sage spiraled from the mesquite box in Tomás' hands, as he offered the mixture to Crow. There was a little dark book fairy on top of a display case, chin in its hands, as neatly jacketed as the copy of Mitsuye Yamada's _Desert Run_ contained in the glass. Maggie's voice was a liquid run of words, rhythmic as a song. She must have been talking for some time, for she mentioned Cooper's editor, and her own, the production team, the printer.... 

"...alongside artist Dora del Rio," MAggie said. 

Dora blinked. She was, somehow, at the front of the room, and people were clapping. There were faces in the crowd she knew and loved, and strangers familiar and new. Fox whistled, and the boys from the band whooped from the wine table, and leaning against the wall Juan offered her a shamed nod of support - but he was here, and standing. Crow, darkly amused, had one of the Jackalope book fairies on his shoulder. 

"Dora hand-bound copies of the Rincon poems," Maggie said. "She's going to give a few words about the process."

She'd done this before. Never for so many people, and never for her own friends and neighbours, but she had words for this. 

Dora stepped up onto the platform, and smiled.


End file.
